The Real Peter Pan (8 page)

It was to this thoroughly English home-county jewel, a distance of about ten miles, that Barrie brought Sylvia and Michael one afternoon in the summer of 1903. Dolly, now mother of two-year-old Elizabeth, known as ‘Girly', was expecting them for tea. It was a sunny afternoon at the end of a week of incessant rain. The idyllic picture was captured in Dolly's diary.

Barrie with his faraway look and hand-held children: one can imagine nothing but beauty and goodness coming of it. But a darker side was also apparent. For Dolly reported that Sylvia had ‘a sort of morbidness about her'. She interpreted this as ‘a sort of premonition'.

When she began to say something critical about Barrie in the presence of three-year-old Michael, ‘I remember [Sylvia] saying “Ssh” when I burst out with [it] … looking at Michael [in case he
heard], and I felt quite ashamed.' Dolly referred to this as Sylvia's ‘apprehensive imagination'.

Mackail wrote of Barrie at this time that his ‘gifts' could be ‘turned on to hypnotise almost anyone'. It was Svengali and Trilby all over again.

B
ARRIE STARTED WRITING
Peter Pan
on 23 November 1903. Its original title,
The Happy Boy,
changed to
Fairy
, then
Peter and Wendy,
later still
The Great White Father,
and latterly, before settling as
Peter Pan,
it was
Anon
– A Play
. He claimed the first hand-scripted draft to have been mislaid, but in fact he had given it to Maude Adams, the first actress to play Peter in America. On page two he wrote a note vertically down the page from the top left-hand corner – ‘To Maude Adams this the M. S. of Peter Pan from his humble servant and affectionate friend J. M. Barrie.' The manuscript, all handwritten and containing many second thoughts by Barrie, is now safely in the Library of Indiana University.

From it we see that the original cast list comprised: Mrs Darling; Peter Pan; John Frederick Darling; Alexander Roger Darling; Tootles; Nibs; Slightly; Curly; First Twin; Second Twin; Captain Hook; Starkey; Mr Darling; Nannna; Tiger Lily; Tippy (the Last Fairy); Wendy Maria Elizabeth Darling; Pirates; Redskins; Beautiful Mothers etc; a crocodile; a lion; a jaguar; and a Bunch of Wolves.

No Michael. His role was taken at this stage by ‘Alex' or ‘Alexander', possibly on account of the growing unease at home about Barrie's increasingly close friendship with him. Barrie had never used the true names of any of the boys in a work before. However, that would be corrected on the cast list the following year, when Michael was very much in evidence.

No Smee either, no Noodles, Mullins, Jukes, etc. Nanna was spelled with three ‘n's (later two), and Tinkerbell went under the name of Tippy. That would change with Tink being ‘quite a common girl, you know. She is called Tinker Bell because she mends the fairy pots and kettles.'

In Barrie's hometown Kirriemuir in Scotland, these sort of good fairies were known as brownies, which during the day hid in out-of-the-way corners of the house, but at night would make themselves useful in some onerous or pressing housework.

The production wasn't plain sailing. Beerbohm Tree, the famous Shakespearian actor/producer at His Majesty's Theatre, rejected the play, even suggesting that Barrie had gone quite mad. But he sold the idea to American impresario Charles Frohman over dinner at the Garrick Club, and so began one of the most fruitful associations in the history of theatre.

By the spring of 1904 the play was in production and the costumes for the lost boys were modelled on the berets, blouses and breeches Barrie first saw George and Jack wearing in Kensington Gardens in
1897. Sylvia had provided a basketful, along with photographs and a sketch of Michael. On 20 November, he wrote to her:

Barrie arranged for Sylvia and the boys to attend a rehearsal after the school term finished in late December. They were introduced to members of the cast as the real authors of the play and allowed to fly about the stage.

The original script commenced, as future scripts, with the famous scene in the Darling nursery at night – which could just as well be the boys' nursery on the top floor of 23 Kensington Park Gardens. We have the antics of the children at bedtime, amusing but almost too true characterisations of Arthur and Sylvia as Mr and Mrs Darling, and of Nana of course, based on Luath. Mr and Mrs Darling leave for a dinner engagement. Peter Pan appears at the window looking for his shadow (left behind on an earlier appearance), meets Wendy, who sews back his shadow and offers Peter a kiss, which becomes
confused with a thimble because, being motherless, he doesn't know what a kiss is. Wendy gives him a kiss (a thimble) and Peter returns the favour by giving her an acorn button.

Tink is also discovered and redefines herself as not at all the brownie of Scottish folklore, rather a tricksy, even malignant creature who is in love with Peter (he, innocent of all matters of the heart), and has Wendy jealously in her sights. Wendy, on the other hand, is appalled to learn that Tinkerbell is the only fairy left.

We learn from Peter that ‘any time a child says, “I don't believe in fairies” there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead. They just crumple up like that [bending a finger].' Barrie returns us to this thought towards the end of the play when Tink, whose personality has been transformed, drinks Peter's medicine (poisoned by Hook) in order to save him, and appears to be dying. ‘Her light is growing faint,' says Peter, ‘and if it goes out, that means she is dead!' She does, however, manage to whisper to Peter that she thinks she might survive if children's belief in fairies was somehow affirmed.

Peter rises and throws out his arms – ‘he knows not to whom' and implores ‘She's going to die unless we do something. Do you believe in fairies? Clap your hands! Clap your hands and say, “I believe in fairies!”'

On opening night at the Duke of York Theatre – 27 December 1904 – the cast held their breath. This was the crux. For if the audience booed and said ‘No!' (as a few nasties did in later performances), Barrie was sunk.

He needn't have worried and probably didn't personally. As one, the audience, which included more grown-ups than children, shouted that they
did
believe and put their hands together and clapped.

Tink's light rose to the applause, amounting to affirmation that
unless we do believe in a world of the spirit, the real world can be no more than banal.

Some reviewers celebrated this deeper significance of the play and Mark Twain wrote to Maude Adams, who would play the lead role in America, that
Peter Pan
was ‘a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age'.

Barrie's skilful handling of the audience's emotions was matched only by the mechanical engineering for the flying. The Kirby Flying Ballet Company had filed a patent for a drum-and-shaft-based system in 1898, and produced a highly successful refined version for Barrie in 1904.

‘Flying' was of course the big test. If you could fly like Peter Pan you could leave the real world behind and enter the Neverland, like du Maurier in
Peter Ibbetson
, but in a kind of children's nursery sort of way.

Not unlike the
deus ex machina
of Greek tragedy, the machine used to convey actors playing gods onto the stage, for Barrie Kirby's machine would affirm and realise the children's belief in Peter Pan.

In the original script Wendy is nervous, she's prepared to be taught how to fly but ‘though I learn, mind, I won't go away with you … I don't think there's the least chance of my going.'

Peter replies: ‘You won't be able to help it.'

She doesn't understand that in order to fly you have to let go. Michael, who ‘looked as sharp as a knife with six blades and a saw', was the first of the boys to do so – and once you've let go you are already in the Neverland.

So successful was this aspect of the play that children were having accidents at home trying to fly, and the Prince of Wales was supposed to have had to be restrained from flying out of the Royal Box. So Barrie added a line about having to be sprinkled with fairy dust before the flying instructions would work.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1904, as first rehearsals began, Arthur moved the whole family out of London. It would do him no good, however, for already Barrie held the emotional balance of the family fast in his hand.

He made a symbolic gesture that underlined that his involvement with them would not be stymied by distance – he made Sylvia a gift of a horse and cart and continued writing to her and the boys, signing himself to Sylvia as ‘Your loving J. M. B.'

Certainly it did nothing to curtail the separate holidays. And although visits to Kensington Gardens would be less regular and there'd be no more summer holidays at Black Lake on the scale of previous years, the move would not stop Barrie and Michael continuing to explore both, and in greater depth than before.
Also, according to Mackail, over the next few years Barrie visited them over a hundred times – ‘for the day, for the night, or for the week-end'.

The new home, Egerton House in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, was a two-storey Elizabethan mansion on the High Street. Berkhamsted was a commuter town thirty-three miles north-west of London. The boys loved it. When the house was sold at auction in 1895, the property had comprised three sitting rooms, a dining room, a billiards room, a conservatory, four bedrooms, four box rooms and stables, and the garden with orchard was extensive enough for Black Lake Cottage never to be a justifiable draw in the following summers.

Dolly Ponsonby tells what Sylvia made of it when, on 13 February the following year, she stayed there as Sylvia's guest:

It happened at this time that the writer A. E. W. Mason, a dedicated bachelor who was a firm friend of Barrie, introduced him to Captain Robert Falcon Scott. They took to one another ‘instantaneously', according to Mackail – ‘something more than a response
on both sides. Here, for Barrie, was the bravest and manliest sailor in the world. There, from Scott, was such instant admiration – spurred on by all the tricks and all the spells – that he was captured and appropriated at once.'

Barrie described their first meeting in an Introduction to
The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, RN, CVO, on his Journey to the South Pole,
which he edited after the explorer's death in 1912.

The Black Lake holidays had coincided with Scott's first, heroic and widely publicised expedition to the Antarctic (1901–03). Throughout the country, patriotic fervour permeated all levels of society in hopes that the Union Jack should wave first at the South Pole. Indeed, Scott became a focus for patriotism leading up to the 1914– 18 war, such that 6,000–8,000 eager young men applied, as for a modern pop idol competition, for a place on his 1911 expedition.

Reports of his heroic exploits had added spice to the games, and now Barrie began to court him (there is no better word). He confessed himself ‘intoxicated' by Scott's two-volume record of his first
Antarctic expedition,
The Voyage of the Discovery,
which he ‘fell on [and] raced through' before flying with his new friend to a rehearsal of
Peter Pan,
which left Scott ‘exhilarated and impressed'. He next took him to Black Lake Cottage, and mounted an accelerated rerun of the Castaway games. From this time his letters to Scott were signed, ‘Your loving … J. M. Barrie'.

Soon he would invite him into the inner sanctum, his ‘family' – and introduce him to Sylvia and the boys. What this meant to Michael was that he and Nico would join the two men after lock-out at Kensington Gardens for what Barrie referred to as ‘our Antarctic exploits'.

These involved a race to reach the Pole ‘in advance of our friend Captain Scott and cut our initials in it,' wrote Barrie in 1924. ‘It was a strange foreshadowing of what was really to happen.' Presumably then Barrie and Michael's team won, for ‘what was really to happen' was the fatal 1911 expedition when Scott was beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, and died in his tent only a handful of miles away from safety, after Captain Oates trudged to his frozen grave with the immortal words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.'

During the Easter holidays of 1905, Sylvia travelled with Barrie to Normandy, taking Michael. Peter described Michael at five as ‘just about at his most beautiful', his curls and dress such that he would almost certainly been taken as a girl. He was accompanied by his more rumbustious brother Jack (ten), while Arthur, George and Peter went north to Kirkby Lonsdale. ‘It has always seemed to me, looking back,' wrote Peter, ‘that this arrangement can hardly have been come to without a good deal of argument and protest; and Mackail evidently takes that view. But who can say with any certainty? I have no letters referring to the episode…'

The party stayed at L'Hostellerie de Guillaume Conquérant in
Dives, the town in Northern France where William the Conqueror set sail with his fleet to conquer England in 1066.

One afternoon Barrie bought Michael a costume and had him reciting Romeo's call to Juliet, who was played by Sylvia leaning over the balcony of the hotel.

In the evenings he took Sylvia to the casino at Trouville, always the frivolous painted lady of this area. We learn from Barrie's notebook that ‘Sylvia gambles – loses – gambles children.' Not literally of course, but there was a ticklish shard of truth in it.

Sylvia was nothing if not honest. She would love to have money – ‘I should like to have gold stays and a scented bed and real lace pillows,' she once wrote to Arthur's sister. Now Barrie was so rich that he could afford anything she might want. ‘After he made the boys famous,' said Jack, ‘she [Sylvia] wore her children as other women wear pearls or fox-furs.'

While he loved his mother dearly, Jack alone of the boys recognised that the various strengths of his parents were not in any traditional Edwardian sense evenly distributed. For example ‘if one of the boys was ill, it was never Sylvia who held their heads or took their temperatures – it was always Arthur who did that kind of thing.' Interesting how at odds this view was with Barrie's about Sylvia's motherliness.

His attitude set Jack apart from his brothers. ‘Jack sort of took against Uncle Jim,' remembered Nico. ‘Jack, who worshipped our father and mother, couldn't stand the thought of this little man thinking he could take Father's place.'

After the Paris trip, while Mary was motoring in France, Barrie invited Sylvia and Michael to Black Lake Cottage, because, he said, he needed Michael's company to inspire him in his writing, the seminal scene already described in Chapter One.

Although cricket wasn't the main point of the invitation, Black Lake Cottage had from the start been an important venue for an annual cricket festival for Barrie's team, the Allahakbarries, by then well-known.

Barrie was himself a good cricketer, and the team had formed around some of his earliest friends after coming to London in the mid-1880s. His early years in London had been a lonely time. He had shared rooms with Thomas Gilmour, a constant support emotionally who also helped him organise his finances. Money was never of interest to Barrie, nor did he wish it to be.

Beyond Gilmour he'd met a few fellow writers in the offices of a magazine called
Home Chimes
, which operated from a tiny office up two flights of stairs in a narrow lane off Paternoster Row in the City. Among them was Jerome K. Jerome, who found fame with
Three Men in a Boat.

‘We were an odd collection of about a dozen,' Jerome recalled. ‘We dined together at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask.'

On other days of the week, according to Joseph Connolly in his biography of Jerome, ‘Cosy evenings were quite the norm. George Wingrave and Car Hentschel would be typical company, with possibly J. M. Barrie or one or two others dropping in.'

More often, however, Barrie spent the evening alone, writing and then lying awake while Gilmour slept – which meant that Gilmour would get more work done during the day than Barrie, who having slept badly would have to take a nap on the sofa during the afternoon, his brain tired out.

Cricket bound the men into a team with a common purpose, undertaken with wit but nonetheless serious intent. Barrie loved to play games. It was the one aspect of true boyishness that he
never lost, and he had a way of enthusing others to play with him. His favourites always involved a ‘dead eye'. As a boy it had been spyo, smuggle bools, kickbonnety, peeries, the preens, suckers, pilly, buttony, palaulays, and fivey … On coming to London his skill at tiddleywinks was outstanding. He was amazing and unequalled at throwing cards into a hat. There was also a trick with a penny and a stamp. He'd lick the stamp, place it face down on the penny, then flick it through the air towards the ceiling in such a way that the penny would deposit the stamp on the ceiling. ‘Barrie was almost infallible at this,' a friend recalled. For years, there was one of these stamps stuck to the ceiling of the hall at Chequers following a weekend there with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his wife in 1927.

Later, he espoused shuffleboard, where you sent a metal disc scudding down the deck of a long table to end up as near as possible at the end beyond two lines without dropping off the end into a tray. Or for less of a score you made the disc stop between the two lines.

‘For left-handed JMB, with his wrist and its rare judgment,' wrote Denis Mackail, ‘these were naturally challenges that must be met at once. Night after night, either as a guest or presently as a tenant and host, he exhibited the same skill, the same cunning, and the same insatiable eagerness for one more game.'

But of all the games he played, cricket was without doubt the finest – the game of the gods, as far as he was concerned. Barrie was a gifted, quirky, left-handed bowler of spin, but also a useful right-handed batsman.

‘Barrie was no novice,' the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who played for his team, once wrote. ‘He bowled an insidious, left-hand good length ball coming from leg which was always likely to get a wicket.'

Wrote Mackail:

It was his interest in cricket more than any other game that extended his all-male circle. The idea of a team occurred in 1887 at Shere, a village in Surrey where Jerome had a cottage that summer.

On the way down from London in the train, realising that they hadn't much hope of winning, Barrie asked his friend the explorer Joseph Thomson what the African for ‘Heaven help us' was. The answer came, ‘Allahakbar', so the club became the Allahakbars and later the Allahakbarries.

Against Shere they were all out for eleven runs, but the Allahakbarries became a famous institution, with village and country house fixtures and an annual game first with the famous artistic community in the beautiful village of Broadway in Worcestershire, and then from 1900 in the large flat garden at Black Lake Cottage.

A match would be followed by all the games Barrie could imagine including golf-croquet, and cricket with the men playing left-handed to the ladies. ‘The new variant [of golf] that some inspired character had recently given to the world,' wrote Mackail, ‘had instantly become a mania [for Barrie] only second to cricket, and he must have played it thousands of times during the next thirty-odd years.'